Lines in the Sand

Iraq AGAIN? Didn’t we just FIX that place?

One of the reasons we in America have trouble caring about the Middle East is that we have something quite a few other places in the world don’t: stable borders. When’s the last time a map of this hemisphere actually changed? When was our last real border dispute? “54-40 or fight?” The Confederacy tried to create a new country, but that failed. We still can’t rule out Texas seceding from the Union, I suppose, but it’s unlikely. Our best security feature is the oceans on either side of us.

The irony is that while we’re called the New World and the Middle East is considered the cradle of civilization, most of the countries we see on the map there today haven’t been there all that long. The most stable of them, Israel, has only been a country since 1948. Syria, Iraq and Lebanon were places, but they weren’t really countries until occupying Western powers created borders for them in the early 20^th century. Is Iraq behaving like it’s really a country right now? I think it was Joseph Biden who said some time ago that Iraq could actually be three countries – and some thought he was nuts.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Turks controlled everything in that area. It was called the Ottoman Empire. A friend of mine jokes that these days, the Ottoman Empire is just a furniture store in New Jersey.

Now we have an extremist Islamic faction that wants to create a new state encompassing Syria and Iraq (not a new idea, BTW), at which they could very easily succeed. Then there are the Kurds, who control portions of Iraq, Syria, and even Turkey. I’d be willing to bet that they’re going to end up, when all is said and done, with their own country.

The human cost of all this instability is beyond belief. Aside from the deaths and injuries, millions have been displaced from their homes in Syria. Now, Iraqis who are on the wrong side of the religious factional fence are fleeing theirs in large numbers. These folks may not even be sure what country “home” is now. This is literally a very foreign concept to us on this side of the pond.

It is my belief that whether we like it our not, the West is going to have to get involved in this mess in some way (As an aside, it’s very interesting that we’re jumping up and down because the ISIS group is beheading people, while we didn’t say boo when the Syrian government turned a mechanized army on civilians). I don’t know what form that involvement will take, but we’re going to find we can’t just stand by and let the region shatter.

Yet it seems clear that the map is going to be changing pretty radically again in a short period of time, and the cartographers at the National Geographic better keep their digital paintbrushes wet.